Javier Dufuor on the madrid+d Energía y Sostenibilidad blog reports about a novel lignocellulose biorefinery process developed by Prof. James A. Dumesic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This so-called TriVersa process can yield up to 80% of biomass from birch wood as marketable products.

The Sankey diagram for the TriVersa process shows carbon in biomass flows. Values are in percent, starting with the 100% C molecules in birch wood being used as feedstock.

An interesting detail about this Sankey diagram is that it additionally uses the process “nodes” or “boxes” to indicate operating cost and annualized capital cost. No numbers are given here, but the height of the process box indicates the overall cost (in a kind of stacked bar chart).